Thursday, June 12, 2014

What a great day we had on June 10, 2014, celebrating International Archives Day with the Twitter event #WW1archives!
Lots of archives, liraries, museums, other heritage organisations and tweeps participated, tweeting about the First World War in their archives or private collections.

#WW1archives Day started in New Zealand and Australia with at least seven organisations and tweeps tweeting about the Great War in their archives and collections. Other participating countries followed, most of them in Europe (we counted 14 twittering organisations in The Netherlands, but the UK and France were leading on tweets), but also in South-Africa and the Middle-East. And the last countries that joined #WW1archives were the America's and Canada, who also did a great job.

Almost 1,000 users did more than 2,000 tweets and retweets with a potential reach of almost 1,600,000 and over 5,300,000 impressions.

We enjoyed the documents, pictures, objects and all kinds of resources. It's amazing to see what a treasures we keep in our archives and collections! And we saw a lot of data bases to search for soldiers and refugees. Good work!

We also saw private persons who made wonderful projects or stories of their search for ancestors who were soldier of refugee in the Great War, and persons who shared their privat collections of, for instance, magazines or postcards. Thanks for your special contributions!

We hope you enjoyed participating #WW1archives! The idea to tweet about the First World War in archives and collections came from Thomas Wolf from SIWI-archives in Germany. Do you have an idea for a next international Twitter event on @FollowAnArchive and @AskArchivists? Please let us know.
Thanks to you all for making #WW1archives Day such a great archives event, to show all the resources we keep for people to investigate and make the discovery of their live!